Here, you are urged and encouraged to run your mouths about something important.

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

VIDEO: THIS COULD BE OBAMA'S OIL-LOO

In a warehouse in Maine, miles and miles of oil containment booms are sitting idle. The company who makes them says no one will come pick them up, despite BP being notified of their existence. As if that weren't enough, the company - Packgen - says it has the capacity to make many more. Meanwhile, Barack Obama goes on television to defend himself against un-named 'talking heads' who suggest he isn't doing enough, while proclaiming he needs to know 'whose ass to kick'.

Packgen is demonstrating in a very tangible way, what free market capitalism is all about. Oil booms are not even what they specialize in but after the rig explosion, the company's president saw a need and attempted to fill it. It was the quintessential example of entrepreneurship.

Packgen’s main business is not making oil boom. They make specialty packaging materials for shipping and storing environmentally sensitive materials. But when Packgen’s president, John Lapoint, saw the BP oil spill in the news, he understood right away that to have any hope of containing the oil drifting towards the shoreline, lots of floating boom would be necessary.

Free market capitalism at work is a win/win for everyone. However, in this case, that free market capitalism ran into a corporate bureaucracy and Big Government incompetence, which ends up being a lose/lose for everyone.

Packgen took a risk based on a clear need. BP will not purchase the booms from them because they're not an approved vendor. BP suffers because it can't work around its own bureaucracy in a time of crisis; Obama suffers because he won't "kick" his own "ass" to get the booms down to the Gulf; countless industries like tourism and fishing suffer because the oil continues to come ashore; Packgen suffers because BP won't purchase something they desperately need and Packgen is willing to provide. Consequently, the company bleeds money like BP bleeds oil.

Once they started making the boom, Packgen got to be quite good at it:

Maine, like the rest of the country, is suffering from very high unemployment. But its residents aren’t out of work because they aren’t useful; they’re useful, but out of work because there’s nothing much useful to do. Lapoint was able to immediately add two shifts of competent and motivated workers, and by the fourth day of production was making forty thousand feet of boom a day.

What have the private sector champions been screaming about most? Government is a hindrance and needs to get out of the way. If there is a silver lining in all of this, perhaps a very real and tangible example like the one on display here will be it. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has been screaming at a big government bureaucracy that has been ignoring his pleas, likely for political reasons. If the government would let the private sector work, perhaps Jindal would have been listened to.

Even the Governor of Maine is trying to help by visiting the Packgen warehouse to call public attention to it. In a video, Gov. Baldacci offered encouragement to the Packgen workers, telling them they were doing excellent work and thanking them for their efforts.

The governor of Maine, John Baldacci, visited the facility and made a video plea to no one in particular to close the deal. Maine Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins wrote a letter on May 21 to the secretary of the Interior, the administrator of NOAA, and the commandant of the Coast Guard to alert them to the existence of Packgen, their supply of boom, and their demonstrated capacity to make more. I have no idea if those are the correct persons and agencies to notify about the manufacturing capacity and the availability of boom. One wonders if the senators know.

A clearer example of the failings of Centralized planning, bureaucracy, and socialist policies you will not find.

Senator Jim DeMint thought the health care debate might be Obama's "Waterloo". It's looking more and more like his Waterloo may actually involve red tape, red ink, and oil. Too bad it's at the expense of the country he was elected to lead.

Don't look now but Big Government and Bureaucracy is getting its A$$ kicked.